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Cain Camp Turns Google Searches to Its Benefit

Searching Google for information about “Cain Sharon Bialek” and other keywords related to the sexual harassment allegations against Herman Cain?

Instead of the most recent news report popping up first on Wednesday, the Cain campaign paid for search results to produce an ad with links to a new Web site, CainTruth, devoted to defending Mr. Cain, the Republican presidential candidate, and telling his side of the story.

Herman Cain’s campaign has paid for search results to produce an ad with links to a new Web site, www.CainTruth.com.

Promising to help “bypass the media filter,” the new Web site’s banner headline reads: “Get the Truth About Herman Cain.” One of the posts, published on Wednesday, is titled: “Media Obsessed With Nonsense; the Voters and I Are Not.” In the post, Mr. Cain explains that he is a “serious person” and that he is not going to abide by the rules that the news media set.

Targeting keywords for searches about the sexual harassment allegations is the latest effort by the Cain campaign to use digital tools and some of the new political online advertising products to defend him against allegations that he made sexual advances toward several women while president of the National Restaurant Association in the 1990s.

Not long after Politico broke the story of the harassment accusations on Oct. 30, Mr. Cain’s campaign took to Twitter to help rebut them. In addition to tweeting to their 157,000 followers from their own account, @thehermancain, the Friends of Herman Cain Inc. bought a message on Twitter using one of the political advertising products made available to campaigns in September called “promoted tweets.”

The link brought users to an article by The Washington Examiner with the campaign’s response, including a comment from the campaign spokesman, J.D. Gordon, who described the accusations as “thinly sourced allegations.”

“It is always important to control the message and when there is so much noise online, it is important for us to get in front of it and put our message out there,” said Michael Johnson, new-media director for Mr. Cain’s campaign. He said the promoted tweets also popped up for people searching on Twitter for the hashtag #tcot, which stands for “top conservatives on Twitter.”

By Oct. 31, the promoted tweet had been shared on Twitter by hundreds of people. In the coming days, the campaign purchased other promoted tweets, including one that shared a link with a video of Mr. Cain’s appearance at the National Press Club.

But in recent days, Mr. Johnson said the campaign had been using promoted tweets and the campaign’s Twitter account to focus on Mr. Cain’s goals and significant fund-raising gains in Iowa, not the allegations. “We’re trying to focus on the campaign, itself,” he said. The campaign is also using a Facebook app and advertising to help meet its fund-raising goals in Iowa.

Mr. Cain’s campaign has consistently performed well on the social media front, winning high praise for the campaign’s Twitter account, and high engagement on his Facebook page. The candidate added 15,000 Facebook fans last week, six times as fast as Mitt Romney, continuing to dominate a tool measuring political candidates on Facebook that is maintained by InsideFacebook, an industry blog.

Mr. Johnson said that in Wednesday’s night Republican debate, he expected the campaign to use promoted tweets again, but would not be sending a canned message. He said the campaign would be live-tweeting Mr. Cain’s performance during the debate and would choose to promote a message or a point that seemed to be resonating with people. “The stream moves so fast that there are some messages that you want to have stick around a little longer,” he said.

After Twitter made political advertising available to candidates in September, the campaign of Mr. Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, bought a promoted tweet with a message linking to his campaign Web site for people searching Twitter for information about the debate, using the hashtag #gopdebate.

Mr. Cain’s use of Twitter’s new political advertising tools comes as it is working to bolster its presence in Washington and challenge Google’s AdSense for a piece of the millions of dollars spent in digital political advertising.

On Tuesday, Twitter hired Mindy Finn, a highly regarded longtime Republican digital strategist who worked for Mr. Romney’s campaign in 2008, to join its expanding Washington operation to work with campaigns on developing strategies using Twitter and its new advertising tools. In September, Peter Greenberger also joined Twitter’s Washington office after having run Google’s political advertising unit since 2007.

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